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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 5233888" data-attributes="member: 22779">I love me the mega-dungeon as well.I ran the World's Largest Dungeon and learned a few things.1.  Do not make your maps 2D.  Make sure that many, if not all the rooms, have a vertical aspect - stairs, balconies, connecting tunnels that are ten feet off the floor, pits, what have you.  Adding a third dimension makes climbing monsters much more fun to run - they're the dungeon version of fliers - and it adds so much to the encounter.2.  Don't make room=encounter.  Put encounters outside of rooms.  Corridors with parties of baddies moving from A to B.  Something in the pit trap.  That sort of thing.3.  Drop maps as treasure.  Often.  The one problem I found with mega-dungeons is that the players lack any real information about their location.  They cannot make informed decisions, so, every choice winds up being mostly random.  Give them a map and now they can plan ahead.  Heck, a scrawled piece of paper with some orc tracing his guard route is worth lots to the players.4.  Do enforce some level of "player skill" but don't be a dick.  Sure, the players have to state they are searching a room, for example, but, don't force them to check each part individually.  It just wastes time and becomes so frustrating.  I think that when people talk about dungeon crawling being boring, THIS is the primary reason.  Spending 5 minutes of real time checking out a room is fine.  Spending 30 minutes on every room because the GM is a dick and makes you check each flagstone individually is not good pacing.5.  Not every monster wants to kill you.  Add in lots of neutral or even friendly NPC's.  A captured prisoner is a great source of information.  That gnome that is working for the minotaurs doesn't have to be hostile.  He can be bribed/intimidated.  Which brings me to my next point-]6.  Don't be stingy with information.  This right here is the number one cause of frustration for players.  They actively try to get information about the setting, about what's in the next room, about anything, and the GM continuously blocks all attempts.  Every captured prisoner would rather die than reveal information.  Every neutral is a moron and has no idea where anything is.  No one outside the dungeon knows anything other than the most basic of information.  Don't do this.  Infodump every chance you get.  Does it really matter if the players know a bit about the layout of a particular area?  Is it going to break the game?  I don't think so.  It might give the players a bit of a tactical advantage, but, you know what?  GREAT!  That's ten thousand times better than having them stumble around randomly, opening door after door because they have no idea of where they should actually go.</blockquote>

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